Write something on a blockchain.

It's like Twitter, but with cutting edge distributed technologies, so no central entity owns your data.

Specifically, we use smart contracts on
Ethereum
to keep track of your posts. The actual contents
of your posts are stored on
IPFS,
a distributed file sharing protocol.

Why build this on a blockchain?

One word: Transparency.

You own your data

One of the most common complaints about today's social networks is that they control
the algorithms that decide what content you get to see. They do this because they need to optimize
for advertising, but it's not always in the user's best interest.

Unfortunately, you can't just take your data and use it in a different app. Your data is owned by a central
entity, and it's not in their best interest to share it.

On Numa, all your data is stored in a public, distributed way, so that it's impossible for any entity to revoke
your access to your data.

No Lock-In

You spend all this time creating content and building a network, but what if you want to switch to a different
platform? On today's social networks, the data is restricted, so switching platforms means starting from scratch.

On Numa, since we can't restrict your data, you can take it wherever you want.

No Censorship

Anyone can spin up their own
gateway server,
connect to Ethereum, and create a new message on the network.
That means that no one can stop you from posting content.

If you post illegal content, we reserve the right to take it down from this website, as well as our IPFS nodes.
But if you run your own servers, there is nothing we can do.

If people think that we're too aggressive with our censorship, anyone else can create
a client that gives access to the rest of the data.

How does it work?

When you create an account, message, follow, or favorite on Numa, the data behind that action is
uploaded to IPFS. Then, you post a reference to that IPFS data using your Ethereum account on a
smart contract.

That way, you don't have to actually depend on this website for anything. You can use someone else's
gateway, or run your own. It's all up to you.

Is there a cryptocurrency?

You have to spend a little bit of Ethereum to interact with the network. Each smart contract call is
engineered to use as little 'gas' as possible, so that transaction fees are very small. Each transaction
uses roughly ~0.00004 ETH, when you follow current normal gas prices. This works out to between $0.01-0.10 USD,
depending on the price of Ether.

You're currently on our staging server, which interacts with Ethereum's Ropsten test network.
You can get free Ethereum on this network by visiting
a faucet.